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Robert H. Frank: Why Single-Payer Health Care Saves Money (NYT)
Robert H. Frank: Why Single-Payer Health Care Saves Money (NYT)
Total costs are lower under single-payer systems for several reasons. One is that administrative costs average only about 2 percent of total expenses under a single-payer program like Medicare, less than one-sixth the corresponding percentage for many private insurers. Single-payer systems also spend virtually nothing on competitive advertising, which can account for more than 15 percent of total expenses for private insurers. The most important source of cost savings under single-payer is that large government entities are able to negotiate much more favorable terms with service providers. In 2012, for example, the average cost of coronary bypass surgery was more than $73,000 in the United States but less than $23,000 in France.
·nytimes.com·
Robert H. Frank: Why Single-Payer Health Care Saves Money (NYT)
Here’s What Ta-Nehisi Coates Told Congress About Reparations (NYT)
Here’s What Ta-Nehisi Coates Told Congress About Reparations (NYT)
Many of us would love to be taxed for the things we are solely and individually responsible for. But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach. It would seem ridiculous to dispute invocations of the founders, or the Greatest Generation, on the basis of a lack of membership in either group. We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It’s impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.
·nytimes.com·
Here’s What Ta-Nehisi Coates Told Congress About Reparations (NYT)
This Is All Donald Trump Has Left (Deadspin)
This Is All Donald Trump Has Left (Deadspin)
His politics, to the extent that they’ve ever been legible, have always been off-the-rack big city tabloid bullshit—crudely racist exterminate the brutes/back the blue authoritarianism in the background and ruthless petty rich person squabbling in the front. His actions since becoming president have been those of a dim, cruel child playacting at being a powerful man—giving orders without quite knowing what they mean or how they might be carried out, taunting enemies, beating up the people he can afford to beat up without having to be called to account for it, lying as needed or just for yuks. He hasn’t changed a thing since graduating from punchline to president. It’s been clear for decades that Trump was both an asshole and a dummy; this is now a problem not just for the odd unlucky cocktail waitress and his staff of cheesy apparatchiks but for literally every person on earth.
·theconcourse.deadspin.com·
This Is All Donald Trump Has Left (Deadspin)
Ronald A. Klain: Zika is coming, but we’re far from ready (Washington Post)
Ronald A. Klain: Zika is coming, but we’re far from ready (Washington Post)
It is not a question of whether babies will be born in the United States with Zika-related microcephaly — it is a question of when and how many. For years to come, these children will be a visible, human reminder of the cost of absurd wrangling in Washington, of preventable suffering, of a failure of our political system to respond to the threat that infectious diseases pose. … These are not random lightning strikes or a string of global bad luck. This growing threat is a result of human activity: human populations encroaching on, and having greater interaction with, habitats where animals spread these viruses; humans living more densely in cities where sickness spreads rapidly; humans traveling globally with increasing reach and speed; humans changing our climate and bringing disease-spreading insects to places where they have not lived previously. From now on, dangerous epidemics are going to be a regular fact of life. We can no longer accept surprise as an excuse for a response that is slow out of the gate.
·washingtonpost.com·
Ronald A. Klain: Zika is coming, but we’re far from ready (Washington Post)
Ezra Klein: The most important issue of this election: Obamacare (Washington Post)
Ezra Klein: The most important issue of this election: Obamacare (Washington Post)
Which is all to say that, yes, this election matters more than most. It matters more politically because the party in power will likely see their agenda affirmed by a cyclical recovery. But it matters more to actual people because the Affordable Care Act is poised to reshape American health care in two years. A vote for Obama is a vote for the law to take effect and for 30 million Americans to get health insurance they won’t get otherwise. A vote for Romney is a vote for the law — and its spending and its taxes — to be repealed. There are few elections in which the stakes are so clear.
·washingtonpost.com·
Ezra Klein: The most important issue of this election: Obamacare (Washington Post)
Andrew Cohen: No One in America Should Have to Wait 7 Hours to Vote (The Atlantic)
Andrew Cohen: No One in America Should Have to Wait 7 Hours to Vote (The Atlantic)
There is no hidden agenda here. The strategy and tactics are as far out in the open as those voters standing in line for hours waiting for their turn to vote. This transparency—of motive and of evidence—is also what distinguishes the complaints that Democrats have about Republican tricks on voting from Republican complaints about Democratic tricks on voting. Widespread "in-person" voter fraud or voting by illegal immigrants exists mostly in the minds of conspiracy theorists. Yet proof of voter suppression is visible to all of us with the naked eye. All we have to do is look. There is no political equivalence here—only more lamentable false equivalence.
·theatlantic.com·
Andrew Cohen: No One in America Should Have to Wait 7 Hours to Vote (The Atlantic)
Glenn Greenwald: Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory? (The Guardian)
Glenn Greenwald: Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory? (The Guardian)
With last night's results, one can choose to see things two ways: (1) emboldened by their success and the obvious movement of the electorate in their direction, liberals will resolve that this time things will be different, that their willingness to be Good Partisan Soldiers depends upon their core values not being ignored and stomped on, or (2) inebriated with love and gratitude for Obama for having vanquished the evil Republican villains, they will follow their beloved superhero wherever he goes with even more loyalty than before. One does not need to be Nate Silver to be able to use the available historical data to see which of those two courses is the far more likely one.
·guardian.co.uk·
Glenn Greenwald: Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory? (The Guardian)
Doug Henwood: Why Obama lost the debate
Doug Henwood: Why Obama lost the debate
I don’t agree with this completely, but it’s a solid argument. More broadly, the political problem of the Democrats is that they’re a party of capital that has to pretend for electoral reasons sometimes that it’s not. All the complaints that liberals have about them—their weakness, tendency to compromise, the constantly lamented lack of a spine—emerge from this central contradiction. The Republicans have a coherent philosophy and use it to fire up a rabid base. The Dems are afraid of their base because it might cause them trouble with their funders. Romney believes in money. Obama believes in nothing. Most liberals want to write off Obama’s bad performance as a bad night. It’s not just that. It’s a structural problem.
·lbo-news.com·
Doug Henwood: Why Obama lost the debate
NYTimes.com: Some of Sarah Palin's Ideas Cross the Political Divide
NYTimes.com: Some of Sarah Palin's Ideas Cross the Political Divide
‘She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).’
·nytimes.com·
NYTimes.com: Some of Sarah Palin's Ideas Cross the Political Divide
NYTimes.com: Paul Krugman: The Centrist Cop-Out
NYTimes.com: Paul Krugman: The Centrist Cop-Out
“The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.”
·nytimes.com·
NYTimes.com: Paul Krugman: The Centrist Cop-Out
Rolling Stone: Obama in Command
Rolling Stone: Obama in Command
A good interview, and explains Obama's long-game strategy explicitly. His indignation at progressives and Democrats complaining about the state of things when much has actually been accomplished is reasonable, but his final statement bothers me. "We have to get folks off the sidelines. People need to shake off this lethargy, people need to buck up. Bringing about change is hard — that's what I said during the campaign. It has been hard, and we've got some lumps to show for it. But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place." OK, but what does that mean? What's going to make a difference with ten-to-one odds and enormous corporations and special-interest groups lined up on the other side? Your base gave you a lot of money to help you get elected, but is that what you're asking them to do again, deep in a recession? They need direction, advice, some instruction or insight. What exactly do you want us to 'try harder' at?
·rollingstone.com·
Rolling Stone: Obama in Command
Vanity Fair: Washington, We Have a Problem
Vanity Fair: Washington, We Have a Problem
"A day in the life of the President." "Durable achievement demands a long time horizon—something that the country as a whole seems to have lost. We can’t wait for the carrots to grow—we keep pulling them up to see how they’re doing. Thus, deeply complex problems, from illegal immigration to the BP oil spill—problems that by definition have no quick or easy solution, despite their obvious urgency—become easy emblems of presumptive failure, whatever the president may actually be doing to address them."
·vanityfair.com·
Vanity Fair: Washington, We Have a Problem
Sophiologist: Pres. Obama on Republicans in yesterday’s Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, 9/6/10
Sophiologist: Pres. Obama on Republicans in yesterday’s Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, 9/6/10
"These are the folks whose policies helped devastate our middle class. They drove our economy into a ditch. And we got in there and put on our boots and we pushed and we shoved and we were sweating and these guys were standing, watching us, sipping on a Slurpee."
·sophiologist.tumblr.com·
Sophiologist: Pres. Obama on Republicans in yesterday’s Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, 9/6/10
Robert Reich: The Origins of the Enthusiasm Gap
Robert Reich: The Origins of the Enthusiasm Gap
"A stimulus too small to significantly reduce unemployment, a TARP that didn’t trickle down to Main Street, financial reform that doesn’t fundamentally restructure Wall Street, and health-care reforms that don’t promise to bring down health-care costs have all created an enthusiasm gap. They’ve fired up the right, demoralized the left, and generated unease among the general population."
·robertreich.org·
Robert Reich: The Origins of the Enthusiasm Gap